Friday November 4, 2011

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Shannon de Ryhove.

Making headlines:

South Africa signed an agreement on Thursday with 12 other countries to combat cross-border tax evasion.

South Africa's tax take is under pressure as the country's economic recovery hasn’t been as strong as anticipated. The finance ministry expects revenues to take up to four years to recover to its levels before the recession in 2009.

The Treasury said in a statement it signed the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance at the G20 meetings in France. The treaty would allow the country to share tax information with other countries.

Other signatories include Russia, Australia, Turkey, Brazil, China and Germany.

South African President Jacob Zuma said in a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Cannes that world markets must open up to the least developed countries that had become "innocent bystanders" of the global financial crisis.

He told the business meeting that South Africa felt strongly about the need to open up the world markets in order to stimulate the recovery of the global economy.

Zuma said change was inevitable in order to curtail the effects of the crisis and "realistically" attain a higher and more equitable growth.

However, addressing growth wasn’t possible without first dealing with the root causes of imbalances in the global economy. This required stronger commitments from large deficit and surplus countries and included strengthening the fiscal policy environment, maintaining appropriate monetary policies and refraining from protectionism.

A new report released by Transparency International says companies from South Africa are seen as the fifteenth most likely to use bribery to secure foreign contracts.

Companies from Russia and China, who invested $120-billion overseas in 2010, are seen as most likely to pay bribes abroad. Companies from the Netherlands and Switzerland are seen as least likely to bribe.

Countries were scored on a scale of 0 to 10, where a maximum score of 10 corresponds with the view that companies in that sector never bribe and a 0 corresponds with the view that they always do.

South Africa scored 7.6 out of 10.

Also making headlines:

Zambia’s new government will deliver its budget on November 11.

South Africa’s National Environmental Management Act will be amended to ensure that the private sector and the parastatals have an equal footing under the law.

And, the Egyptian cabinet has amended a document proposing principles for a new constitution that would have shielded the army from oversight by parliament.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.